


It's an Adequate Life, Bucky Barnes

by what_alchemy



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: It's a Wonderful Life, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-27
Updated: 2014-04-27
Packaged: 2018-01-21 00:41:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1531715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a world without Bucky Barnes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's an Adequate Life, Bucky Barnes

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [It's an Adequate Life, Bucky Barnes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8688793) by [SimpsonJr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SimpsonJr/pseuds/SimpsonJr)



> Please note I am choosing not to warn here. This deals with dark themes without necessarily being terribly dark, but keep self-care in mind as you enter.

It would be fitting, Bucky thought, to die where he was born. It was the wee hours of the morning — that was what his mother had called them, all those gossamer snatches of time between midnight and dawn. He remembered that, now. It was the wee hours of the morning, and he was walking on the shoulder of the Brooklyn Bridge. When he looked out beyond the suspension cables, he could see the reflections of Brooklyn and Manhattan glittering on the surface of the East River, bright and vibrant even in dead night. Once in a while, a car passed and threw his own shadow like a ghost all around him. 

Bucky thought he remembered when streetcars and trains traveled this bridge, but sometimes he couldn’t tell the difference between what his own memory spat out and what he’d simply been told was true. Had he really ridden the streetcar into the city, Steve at his side looking up at him with shining eyes, when they had enough dough to go dancing in Harlem, or was that just how his imagination filled in the blank spots of his history? Bucky shook his head; it got too cluttered in there, wondering what was real and what wasn’t. What did it matter anyway? In 2015, the Brooklyn Bridge had room only for cars, bicycles, and pedestrians. 

When another car passed him, and no more flooded him with light, he hauled himself easily over the partition and onto the edge of the bridge. He could go to earth just where he’d sprung, and close the circle of pain and mayhem he’d caused. It would be… symmetrical. Something cosmic would be balanced. Bucky had never gotten the hang of God, but he knew the universe was a thing that demanded blood for blood. 

He just hoped he had enough.

It was early in the autumn, the first chill of the season still a promise rather than a threat, and he closed his eyes to turn his face into a passing breeze. His nose and the tips of his ears went cold. Behind his eyelids, he saw Steve as he once was: small and determined, capable of squeezing him so, so tight. Then he dissolved into the shiny new version, big healthy body no defense for the heartbreak Bucky caused when he said, ‘Just leave me alone, Steve. I’m no good. You stay away from me.’

Bucky knew the truth: Steve would have been better off if Bucky had never been born at all. 

Bucky opened his eyes. He leaned forward over the river, metal hand hooked on a rail. If he hit the water at just the right angle, it would be like concrete, and he’d be smashed to smithereens before he knew what hit him. And if he didn’t, well. The arm would sink him like a stone, and water would fill his throat and his stomach and his lungs, and the river would claim him as its own. Either way, it would be over. It would be finished. And if there were such a thing as rest for someone like him, he could have it.

Bucky took a deep breath and loosened his grip on the bridge. That’s when he heard it:

“Whatchadoin?”

He glanced to his right, where there was a girl, slip-thin, dark haired, and no more than sixteen, perched with her bare feet dangling over the edge of the bridge. She wore a plain navy dress in sturdy fabric and her knobby knees were scuffed with dirt. She looked up at him, eyebrows inquisitive arches over blue-green eyes.

“Get off there!” he said.

“Why, because it’s dangerous?”

“Yes!”

“It’s all right,” the girl said, and stood. In the air. With nothing underneath her. Bucky’s body jolted. She grinned at him and wiggled her hips in a little dance, and suddenly a name swam up from the depths of his memory.

“Becca,” he said. 

“Don’t wear it out,” his sister said. “Hi, shit-for-brains.”

“What in the hell…”

She shrugged and did a little twirl to look out over the East River with him.

“People care about you,” she said. “Sometimes, the universe listens.”

It trickled back slow but steady. He’d last seen her before he shipped out, 1943. He had been twenty-six, she twenty-one and in love with some punk who’d put the tiniest rock on her finger. Their parents were long dead, and they were not close. When he told her he had his orders, she had hugged him close but remained dry-eyed. In his new, haunted life, it had never occurred to him to look up whatever happened to her. It had never occurred to him that he might have family at all. For so long, he had been hardly more than a very animate gun. Guns didn’t have mothers, or fathers, or annoying kid sisters. 

“Did you…”

She didn’t so much turn as she floated around in a way that allowed him to look her in the face. She tilted her head. She looked like hundreds of girls he’d killed.

“Did I what, Buck?”

“Did you have a good life,” he said, gruff. “Did you get old.”

The smile that touched her lips was too knowing for someone who looked like a kid. He supposed she was no such thing — she was a spirit, or a wild hallucination flashing in his brain just before he snuffed it for good. He’d probably pitched himself off the bridge already, and this was how his subconscious was trying to protect him.

“You know,” she said, “I think I did.” 

Bucky nodded and looked back out over the black water.

“Look, Becks,” he said. “I gotta do this. It’s important.”

“Oh yeah? What’s so important?”

“Rabid dogs gotta be put down.”

“Pff.” She rolled her eyes and flapped a hand. “You ain’t foamin’ at the mouth. You ain’t afraid of a little water.”

“I done bad things. I should never’ve been born. The world would be better off without the likes of me.”

Weirdly, that inspired Becca to grin big with all her teeth. Bucky remembered that smile. And he remembered to shield all his soft bits when it came out.

“Them’s the magic words, big brother,” she said. She reached out both her hands and grabbed his free one. Her palms were clouds, and he was falling through the air, but up, up, up.

—

Bucky’s eyes opened and he discovered he was in an alley. He spun around, disoriented, and scowled when he found Becca up on some crates, swinging her legs to and fro.

“Where are we?” he said. “Take me back.”

“Sure I’ll take you back,” she said. “When we’re done here.” She tapped a cigarette out of a box she’d conjured and stuck it into her mouth. With a snap it was lit, and she inhaled the smoke deep, eyelashes fluttering in relief. Suddenly, the old itch trickled through his blood warm and urgent.

“Hey, gimme one, squirt,” Bucky said. Becca smirked at him and threw him the box, but when he raised his hands to catch it, it passed through them like breath. “The hell?”

“Better get used to it, bub,” she said. “We’re not really here, dig?”

“Look, when can I expect this little hallucination to end? Not that this hasn’t been fun and all, but I’m really busy.”

She didn’t say anything, but she took another drag of her cigarette, gaze narrowed on something beyond their position. Bucky turned and followed her line of sight, where he saw three guys barreling toward the alley, a smaller fella hoisted up between them. A very familiar blond head lolled on their shoulders and Bucky’s heart seized up.

“Beck—”

“They can’t even see you, Bucky.”

Sure enough, they charged at him — _through_ him — and dumped Steve onto the ground.

“Stand up, you little shit,” one of the goons said before landing a kick to Steve’s ribs. Bucky leapt into the fray, metal hand poised for a killing blow, but he only ended up standing in the middle of the action, quite literally. He was full on sticking out of a few of the goons, and his feet were planted somewhere in Steve’s abdomen. Steve was curled into a ball, hands covering his head, but it didn’t do much for the way the goons were stomping on him, and neither could Bucky, no matter how he swung his fists or hollered at the top of his lungs.

Steve’s voice rang out then, hoarse, wheezing, but loud enough: “Takes some real cowards to come at a fella three to one.”

“Oh, Stevie, no,” Bucky said. He sent a pleading look Becca’s way, to see if she could do anything now that she was a genie and all, but she only stared back at him, face stony.

“Guess I shouldn’a expected anything more from three lunkheads who wouldn’t leave a woman alone on the subway,” Steve went on. 

“Please,” Bucky said, because it was all he had left. “Please, don’t do this.” He was helpless as another foot came down hard on Steve’s chest, and then Steve was still. Bucky knelt at his side, wishing he could breath air into Steve’s lungs, wishing he could cradle Steve’s head, wishing he could be the weapon he’d been turned into just when he needed it most.

The goons let up then, and one of them muttered a curse.

“Conroy, we gotta get outta here quick,” one of them said.

“Yeah, come on, man, before someone sees,” another said, tugging at the ringleader’s sleeve.

Conroy spat right on Steve’s slack face. All three of them turned tail and beat it out of the alley. Steve’s breath rattled gamely one more time before he went limp and the light left his eyes. A trickle of blood oozed from the corner of his mashed-up mouth.

Bucky just barely got to lean over before his stomach emptied itself all over the ground. He wished he had it in him to cry, but there was nothing. He felt hollowed out and shellshocked. When he finally dragged himself to his feet, he shoved his finger in Becca’s face and screamed at her.

“What the hell was that, huh? Why the hell would you show me that! That never happened, it’s sick and disgusting and what in the hell were you thinking? Make it stop right now, Beck!”

He was breathing hard and his eyes stung fiercely, and Becca, goddamn her, only looked at him with pity. 

“This is the world you wanted,” she said gently.

“What the fuck are you talking about? Quit with the riddles already and take me back. Now I’m gonna throw myself off that bridge harder.”

“This is a world without you in it, Buck,” she said. “You were never born.”

“…What?”

“He was sick, could you hear him?” she said. “That wheeze. Walking pneumonia. And then they got him right in the chest. He was a lot of things, Bucky, but you know he was never built to take a hit.”

“This never happened. This is bullshit.”

“You weren’t there, Buck,” Becca went on, and Bucky began to shake. “You weren’t there to get him his medicine, or to keep him warm when the room was cold, or to even the odds when three lily-livered bastards ganged up on him. Steve Rogers dies in this alley, 1940, and no one finds his body for hours.” She hopped off the crates and flicked her cigarette away as she circled the dead body of the best thing in Bucky’s life. “At least he’s buried with his parents.”

Bucky took a swing at his own sister then, but his fist hit nothing at all.

—

They tumbled into an empty hallway. It looked like every tenement building he and Steve had ever lived in when they were young and poor and on their own. There was nothing to distinguish it from any other.

Bucky rounded on Becca.

“All right, kid, this isn’t funny anymore. Take me back now.”

“Nah,” she said. “Orders is orders, you understand.”

“And just who’s giving you orders?”

“This one comes from the man at the top.”

Bucky gaped at her. “Are you shittin’ me?” he said. “God is real, and he’s man-shaped?”

Becca laughed a little, shaking her head.

“Not the way you think,” she said. “And that’s not what I meant anyway. I meant the head honcho guardian angel. It’s actually a really bureaucratic organization, you wouldn’t like it.”

“Quit feeding me a load of horse shit,” Bucky said.

“If I were corporeal, I would get a lot of spit on my finger and stick it in your ear.”

“I’m leaving,” Bucky said. “I’m leaving right now.”

“Sure, big guy.”

Bucky turned his back to her and trudged down four flights of stairs. When he got to the closed doors, he walked through them like they weren’t even there. The sun blinded him, and he found himself right back in that corridor, Becca looking at him with an unimpressed quirk in her brow.

“Goddamnit!”

“Settle in for the ride, Buck,” Becca said. “No one’s letting you go ’til it’s over, so you might as well enjoy yourself.”

“ _Enjoy?_ Is that what I’m supposed to do when Steve’s heart stops right in front of me and I can’t do anything about it?”

“Okay, so maybe ‘enjoy’ is the wrong word.”

Bucky sighed and shoved his hands in his pockets. He paced the length of the corridor. 

“What does the head honcho want with me, anyway?”

“The world owes you a great debt,” Becca said, all traces of levity evaporating. “We don’t take that lightly.”

Bucky clenched his jaw, his fists.

“You must know,” he said, voice tight. “What I’ve done. How much I’ve ruined. There must be a file somewhere, ten inches thick.”

“What about how much you’ve saved?”

Bucky shook his head, brows drawing downward.

“Just because I saved Steve, and Steve’s Captain America? Being his sentinel is all I’m worth to the world? I ain’t saying it’s a bad reason to exist, Becks, but even you can see Steve don’t need me around anymore. Why the hell should I stick around?”

“There was always going to be a Captain America, even if it hadn’t’a been Steve,” Becca said. “We’re talking about you, Buck. There’s a whole other universe where Steve was never born, but that looks different, dig?”

“I’m nothing but death and destruction. I want it to end.”

Becca’s eyes were kind, and she held out her hand.

“I ain’t touched anyone in a long time,” she said softly. “Sure wish I could, now.”

“Don’t go gettin’ soft on me,” Bucky said. As he turned away, a slender man with a generous spray of freckles across his fair face cleared the stairs carrying a paper bag. He fumbled with his keys and swore, voice breaking. Bucky glanced at Becca when he caught the tears on the man’s eyelashes, but she only swept her hand out when he got the door open, inviting Bucky to follow him in. The man shut the door right on her, but she didn’t appear to notice.

The apartment was small and shabby, containing not much more than a stack of books and a cot to sleep in. Same as all the places he and Steve had shared. Bucky watched him set the bag on a small, rickety kitchen table before knocking through the cupboards and pouring himself a solid five fingers of bourbon. He slammed it back and refilled his glass halfway. He slammed that back too. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and sank down into the lone chair. He pulled a .38 Special from the bag, and with hands dead steady, he loaded it with a single slug. He settled it carefully into his mouth and closed his eyes tight.

“What the hell?” Bucky said. “Becca—”

“Don’t remember him?”

“No!”

“Think, Buck.”

“I _am!_ ”

“Think harder.”

_Little Joe, down the docks, Miss Josephine in the dark, in the clubs, in heels, turning up to work with a big black eye and one side of his mouth torn ragged. He won’t look at Bucky, but when there’s a spare moment and the foreman ain’t looking, Bucky drags Little Joe into a corner and asks him what the hell happened._

_“My sister’s husband,” he says. “He found out I’m— how I am.”_

_“Ah, hell, Joe, how’d he do that?”_

_“Listen, Buck. I think maybe you and Steve should stay out of the scene the next little while, all right? Stick around inside. Treat him nice, y’hear?”_

_“Me and Steve ain’t afraid of no yella mother—”_

_“He’s a cop, Buck,” Little Joe says. “My brother-in-law is a cop.” He slips out from the grip Bucky has on his shoulder and starts walking away. “Raids,” he says as he leaves Bucky in the dark, and Bucky’s stomach clenches._

_When Bucky gets home that night, the neighbor across the way, a soft kind of man with a bit too much bounce in his step, smiles at him real nice. Before he can get his keys out, Bucky licks his lips and sidles up to his door._

_“Hey, guy,” he says. “What’s your name?”_

_“Jefferson McMurtry,” he says, extending a hand. “Call me Jeff.” Bucky shakes it._

_“I’m Bucky Barnes,” he says._

_“I know it,” Jeff says. His smile is an invitation Bucky can’t take even if he were interested, but he must know that. He must see Steve day in and day out. He must see how Bucky looks at him._

_“Listen… I got a tip today, thought you might be interested.”_

_“Oh yeah? And what kinda tip is that?”_

_“The kind where the likes of us lays low for a while, yeah?”_

_The smile fades from Jeff’s face._

_“Thanks,” he says, quiet. “I — thanks.”_

_Bucky slaps him on the back and doesn’t even watch him get into his own apartment. Steve’s inside theirs, and he can’t wait another second to gather him up close, to breathe deep that spot where his neck meets his shoulder, to hold onto him so, so tight._

A shot rang out, and Jefferson McMurtry tipped sideways off the chair with a thud. Blood seeped slow across the floor. Bucky’s heart thundered, and he found his breath hard to catch. Becca walked around the body, coolly detached in her curiosity.

“His neighbors this time around are a pair of newlyweds who won’t stop fighting and fucking,” she said. “There was no one around to warn him.”

Bucky went over to the closed window and stuck his head outside. He heaved breath into his lungs. There was the smell of exhaust and smog and just a whiff of garbage, but it was cool and it soothed him. 

Becca was there, floating around.

“It was his right,” Bucky said. “It was his life and his body and if he needed to do what he needed to do, it’s no business of ours.”

“Keep saying that ’til you believe it,” Becca said. “Want to know what he did in the world you lived in?”

“The real world.”

“Real’s kind of a subjective thing.”

“No, I don’t wanna know.”

“He wrote plays,” she said anyway. “He fell in love. He got his heart broken, fell in love again, got his heart broken, fell in love again. He was at Stonewall. He worked for a health clinic teaching folks about HIV prevention when the government was happy to watch his kind die. He married his sweetheart in 2012. He died happy and old and his life meant something. Not here, like this, without a soul in the world to find him for days.”

“Don’t put this on me,” Bucky snapped. “This is not my fault, don’t put this on me.”

Becca spread her hands and raised her brows.

“Who’s putting it on you?” she said. “You don’t exist.” 

She touched him again, that faint sort of tingling touch that was all she had left of feeling, and they swirled again out of the building and into oblivion.

—

Bucky stumbled when they landed in the HYDRA base.

“Why do I do that?” he said. “Why don’t I go right through, or at least, you know, not fall around like a goddamn idiot?”

“A lot of perception is expectation,” Becca said. “You’re still thinking like an earth walker.” She glided through the abandoned corridors, the overhead lights flickering and illuminating her like a horror movie. Bucky rubbed at his knees and jogged to catch up to her.

“How’d you land this gig anyway?” he said. “Must be a hell of a job application.”

There was silence for a long time as Bucky trailed after her. Sometimes, there was a distant clanging, and the buzz of the lights. Once in a while, screams.

“I thought about you a lot,” Becca said. Bucky, who had been occupied staring resolutely at the forward action of his feet instead of the fine HYDRA decor, raised his head. He met only the messy ponytail sticking out the back of her head. “I died in 2007. You’d been gone for sixty-two years. I thought about you every single day.”

Bucky swallowed. 

“I wished I’d known you,” Becca went on. “I wished I’d taken the time, when we’d both been alive. It ate me, the regret. I named my son for you.”

“God, Beck.”

“Jimmy,” she said. “I wanted to call him James, or Jamie, but Jimmy stuck and that was that. He died in Vietnam.”

Grief and anger, nauseating, slammed into Bucky’s chest and forced tears into his eyes. He hadn’t cried since before he’d been unmade. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, and it wasn’t enough, it could never be enough.

“It’s a punchline, right?” Becca said. “Named for the brother I wasn’t close to, taken the same way. It hurt worse, no offense.”

“No, of course it did,” Bucky said. “Of course it did.”

“But still, you were the one I went over and over in my mind. I’d forgotten your face. All I had were army portraits. I’d forgotten your voice, and how you moved, and it haunted me. I felt guilty.” She laughed, then. “I know a lot more about guilt now. It’s not…terribly productive. It’s the way we convince ourselves we’re good people while sitting around doing nothing to rectify our wrongdoings. The truth was, I felt bad I hadn’t cared more about you, and when Jimmy went down, it was a way for me to torture myself. If I could unravel the secrets of my brother and his death, could I get to the root of my son’s? I tried to find logic in it when there is no logic to how boys die in war — it’s senseless and horrific and random, always. Always.

“So imagine me, eighty five years old, dying in my sleep. People tend to expect certain things: your standard heaven/hell/purgatory, maybe some reincarnation, more and more just a long dreamless sleep. I don’t know what I was expecting. You hope, you know? That whatever it is, it’ll be restful. You think you’ve earned some measure of that. Instead I find myself young again, sitting in an office across the desk from an older fella in a white suit. And he says to me, ‘Rebecca Barnes, you worry too much. Wanna worry full-time?’ And I says, ‘Look, maybe I took a wrong turn somewhere and you can point me toward the pearly gates.’ And he laughed at me, just laughed and laughed. And then he waved a hand to bring up a sort of portal into the mortal realm, and he showed me just who it was he wanted me to worry about. I said yes on the spot.”

Bucky swallowed past the dryness in his throat.

“What was I…”

“Oh, you know,” she said, waving her hand. “Killing someone important. But that’s not what I saw underneath.”

Bucky passed a hand over his eyes. 

“Fine,” he said. “What did you see _underneath?_ ” 

“A lost boy,” she said. “Someone who needed me.”

“I’m not your son, Beck.”

“I know that damn well, James Barnes.” Becca’s voice was a sharp snap that echoed in the narrow corridor. Bucky felt contrition rise hot over the back of his neck. He swallowed down his apologies, because no amount of them could never be enough. 

Silence fell between them and they walked on and on until finally they passed through solid concrete and he found himself in the same prison ward he’d been held in, the first time he’d been taken, 1944. There were hundreds of men — _over a thousand_ an insidious voice from the back of his mind reminded him. These were the men Steve had saved. They stank. They were starving. They shook with cold. And somewhere, Bucky knew, a lucky few were being experimented on. 

Becca didn’t say anything. She just glided slowly, around and around, and Bucky got a good damn look at most all of the soldiers. He recognized some as men from the 107th. He even saw Morita and Dernier. Becca led him around for what felt like hours, until his feet ached and his heart felt just about dead in his small intestine.

“What are we doing?” he said after his feet began to drag. “What are you showing me?”

“Most of these men are going to die,” she said. “The rest… well. That’s another story, for another act in our little play.”

“What are you talking about? Someone’s gotta come for them. There’s a thousand of ’em, and not all Americans. What about the English? The French?”

“Steve came because he was looking for you. There was no rescue mission then, and there isn’t one now. The results of this, Buck — they’re catastrophic.”

“It’s still about Steve, not me.”

“Let’s say Steve survived the alley,” Becca said. “Let’s say Steve became Captain America anyway. What do you think happens?”

“He saves these guys! He’s gotta!”

“He doesn’t, Buck.” Becca swept her hand out in front of her, and sure enough, a little portal swirled to life. Through it, Bucky could see Steve in his USO uniform, those ridiculous tights. When he was told he was with what’s left of the 107th, he didn’t even blink. A chorus girl called him to give her a hand. Backstage, he helped two, three, four girls out of their uniforms. They all gave him lingering kisses for his trouble, and the portal swirled shut on that image.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Bucky said faintly. “He would go. He would.”

“The Steve you know would,” Becca said, and that damnable gentle tone had entered her voice again. “But the Steve you know had someone to save.”

“His dad was with the 107th!”

“Twenty-five years ago.”

“It still means something to him. It always meant something to him.”

“ _You_ meant something to him,” Becca said. “You can dress up what he did as a noble act, and it was, clearly, but at its heart was his need to find you. Without you…” Becca shrugged.

“This is— this is not the right thing. You’re showing me the wrong thing.”

Becca sigh and stopped in front of Jim Morita. He was coughing so hard he couldn’t catch his breath. Bucky reached out to him, but his hand went through his shoulder.

“It’s time you realize you made Steve as surely as Steve made you,” Becca said. “And it’s time you stop casting yourself as the villain to his shining hero.”

Morita gasped and wheezed and went still. 

“No,” Bucky said. “Jesus Christ, no.”

Becca pinned him with her eyes then, and they were very blue in the drab dank of the HYDRA cells.

“At least he dies,” she said. “At least he has that.”

—

A pinchy sort of blink and they were in a bright bathroom. Becca sat on the closed toilet lid, shoulders hunched, dabbing at a gash on her eyebrow.

“What—”

“Over here,” Becca said, and he looked up to find her in the bathtub, so young, waving at him. He glanced back at the Becca on the toilet and realized that version couldn’t see him, couldn’t hear him. She was older, tiny lines radiating from the corners of her eyes, the skin of her forehead delicately creased. 

“What’s going on?” Bucky said. He knelt in front of the toilet. Becca, so thin as to be sharp all over, pressed a rag to her wound, but blood gushed out, undeterred. Head wounds could be like that. 

In the bathtub, Becca said, “Never had a big brother to learn to fight dirty from. Never got my first husband in the balls after the third time he slapped me around and ran away when he dropped like a sack of potatoes. I just stayed, and suffered, and believed this was what love looked like.”

“Fuck, Becca, I’ll kill him.”

Becca snorted. “That’s sweet of you, Buck. But you don’t exist, and all.”

Bucky stood and clenched his metal fist. 

“I could make a detour when we get back. First this son of a bitch, then my date with the East River.”

“No use,” Becca said. “Last I heard he drank himself into an early grave. Just as well. We got bigger things to look at, here.”

“What happens to her?” Bucky couldn’t stop looking. Her small-boned fingers, not shaking. Her downcast eyes. Her hair, dirty, escaping in wild tendrils around her face. In his peripheral vision, the other version of her shrugged.

“She leads a small life. She raises his children. She doesn’t cry at his funeral in 1963, she doesn’t get remarried, she lives to watch all those children die.”

Bucky stood and faced her. She meets his eyes, steady.

“Your life went better than this, in the real world.”

“This is real to her,” Becca said. “There are countless realities, Buck, and this is one of them.”

“Just — just tell me your life was better.”

“It was. I had a lot of happiness.”

Bucky turned his head to look at Becca on the toilet, nursing her wound. In the mirror above her was his reflection. He looked like his sister.

—

Soviet, HYDRA, American, SHIELD. In the end it didn’t matter whose banner waved from the corner of the room, it was always the same: there was a man stripped of his mind, and he was strapped to a chair.

“Jesus,” Bucky said, circling the chair. “What now?”

The man was still, face covered by a contraption, needles in his arms. He was silent, and a sheen of sweat dried on the expanse of his skin. He was cold; there were goosebumps. People in lab coats milled around, adjusting buttons, writing on clipboards. When the man began to shiver, no one moved to cover him.

“You didn’t think you were the end all be all of the Winter Soldier program, did you?” Becca said. Bucky scowled at her, and she shrugged. “Okay so maybe you were, where you come from. But this is a whole new ballgame, Buck. Here, HYDRA’s experiments were never interrupted by the Man with the Plan, and their subjects were never taken from them. In this reality, the end of the war, Hitler’s defeat — it was all incidental to HYDRA.”

“At home, they only got me,” Bucky said faintly. Becca’s mouth curved upward sadly, nothing like a smile. She turned, and he followed her gaze to the man in the chair. 

A woman in a lab coat reached over to lift the cognitive recalibration machine off his face, and the chair eased him back up into a sitting position. Bucky knew that face. He knew that man.

“Who—”

“I’m sorry, big brother.”

“Dugan.” It left his mouth as if without his own volition, as if his body knew the name his mind didn’t. “Dum Dum.” 

Memory slammed into him so hard it felt like a physical blow. All the breath left his body. Dum Dum Dugan, slinging his arm over Bucky’s shoulders while they were being held at the HYDRA base and Bucky was shivering, starving, knowing this would be the death of him. Dum Dum Dugan, a big man who’d never seen him before in his life, squeezing him rough and tight and saying, _Buck up, kid, we’re gonna make these fuckers remember us before they see us in hell._ Dum Dum Dugan, who’d decided Bucky was his friend before Bucky did anything to prove himself worthy of it. Dum Dum Dugan, who reminded him, in that very small way, of what he’d left behind when he went off to war without his best guy.

“Status,” the woman in the lab coat said in Russian. When Dum Dum didn’t respond, she laid light slaps on his cheeks until he was bright with color. “Status,” she said again.

“Gunshot wound, graze, left bicep,” Dum Dum said, flat. “Broken ribs, two, left side. Mending.”

“Very good.” She patted him on the knee and stepped back. “Stand.” Dum Dum stood. A man came up behind her and she stepped out of the way while he fastened a metal collar around Dum Dum’s neck and attached a lead. Dum Dum was led from the lab. Bucky followed at their heels, and Becca trailed along after him. 

Bucky watched, stomach quaking, as Dum Dum was manhandled into a cryogenic chamber. He looked into his eyes as the scientist closed the door on him and pressed a bunch of buttons. There wasn’t even fear in his face when he was told to close his eyes. There was nothing at all.

The scientist left the room and turned out the lights. Bucky wanted to smash his head against the walls.

“Come on,” he heard Becca say. “Miles to go, and all.”

“He didn’t deserve this.” Bucky dragged himself up and followed the faint floating outline of his sister in the dark. 

“No,” Becca said. 

“It’s not fair.”

“No.”

“That’s all you can say right now, ‘no?’ How the hell are you so calm?” Bucky kicked up a foot, and it went right through where he figured her bum must be. It was satisfying the way small things that don’t really matter are satisfying.

“Is being not calm helping you?”

“Oh, fuck you, Beck.”

“You care a lot.”

“What?”

“About your friends. You care a lot.”

“Well, yeah.” He made a face at her in the dark. Wasn’t that the point of being friends with people? 

“Hm.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“ _What?_ ”

“It’s nothing.”

Bucky growled with frustration. If he could touch her, he’d yank on that damn pony tail until she squealed and said uncle.

“Beck, I swear to God.”

“Most fellas decorating ledges like you were don’t care about nothin’.”

Buck opened his mouth but he had no retort. They had walked themselves onto a rooftop, somewhere in Britain if Bucky had to go by the architecture, where the Winter Soldier was perched with his face up close and personal with the sights on a sniper rifle. Only, that couldn’t be Dum Dum. That couldn’t be any white fella at all. Bucky frowned and leaned in close, as if proximity might improve his chances at seeing what was underneath the mask. When he glanced up for a clue from Becca, he found her floating out over the edge of the building, looking downward. The Winter Soldier’s finger tightened. Bucky’s heart began to race, and he scrambled up to see who the target was.

When he looked down onto the street, he saw Peggy Carter. A little older, a little harder, but as beautiful as she had been the day Bucky saw her eyeing up Steve in that bar, dressed to the nines and dazzling. She was talking to someone in a Colonel uniform, and she was the one in charge. His breath caught, and in the moment it took to whip around back to the Winter Soldier and throw himself futilely into him, Peggy was dead on the ground and everyone around her was screaming. 

Bucky watched as the Winter Soldier put his rifle away with no sense of urgency. Then, he took out a comm device and knocked his mask away. Through the war paint and the lack of expression, Bucky knew that face.

“Target eliminated,” the Winter Soldier said in Russian. The line crackled, and then another voice emerged. 

“Come to extraction point B, comrade. Your country thanks you.”

The Winter Soldier dropped the comm device into a pocket and made his way off the roof. 

“That was Gabe,” Bucky said to Becca when he was gone. “That was Gabe Jones.” Gabe, charming and handsome and making all the French girls swoon. Gabe, too much of a gentlemen even then to cheat on his sweetheart back home. Bucky had thought, once upon a time, that Gabe might know about him and Steve, might be doing his damnedest to protect them. He was, as Bucky’s mother might once have said, a good egg.

“’Fraid so,” Becca said.

“Becca. How many Winter Soldiers are there? How many are my friends?”

“Too goddamn many, Buck,” Becca said. She floated around him. He thought he could feel static, a human heat, but it must have been his imagination. “Come on,” she said. “We’re not done yet.”

“Is this hell?”

Becca stopped and turned around. Her face pinched as if uncomprehending. Bucky swallowed and tried on a smile. It came out all wrong. He shoved his hands in his pockets and bounced up on his toes once.

“I did it, huh?” he said. “I threw myself off that bridge, and hell is real, and I’m gonna watch everyone I know and love suffer for the rest of eternity. Gotta say, at least the Big Man is creative.”

Becca sighed as if the whole ordeal were tiresome, but it came out shaky and unconvincing.

“The Big Man is a saxophone player, not a deity,” she said. “Well. Not to most people, anyway. We’ll get you an album when we get back.”

“…what?”

“Come on, Buck. You’re dilly dallying.”

“I get it, you know. We can stop doing this.”

“Oh yeah? And just what do you get?”

“You’re torturing me. I’m being tortured.” He hitched up his shoulders. “I’d rather the fire and brimstone, honestly. That, I can take. So just—” He waved a hand. “—do that thing you do and take me to the regular hell.”

Becca looked at him with boundless pity and turned back around.

“Sorry, Buck,” she said. “You don’t get it at all. Now come on.”

They walked and walked, and Bucky couldn’t say precisely what the scenery was like, but when they finally stopped, they were back in a HYDRA lab watching another Winter Soldier massacring a bunch of scientists. This time it took less than a second for Bucky to recognize him as James Falsworth, and it took James Falsworth’s Winter Soldier less than a second to snap two necks and break some femurs beyond repair. The sounds he made seemed inhuman, the sounds of a trapped and desperate animal willing to destroy itself if it meant destroying what kept it in chains. The din of his snarling and the screams of the scientists vibrated through Bucky’s body and churned whatever was left in his gut. The chaos filled his ears and his brain until there seemed no room for thoughts, and somehow it crossed into his vision and blinded him to everything but the whites of the Winter Soldier’s eyes, the panic, the blood. 

Three tranquilizer darts dropped him like an anchor, and then Alexander Pierce, far too young to be so cold already, strolled out to circle the Winter Soldier’s prone body. He was flanked by two gunmen. He stopped in front of a man in a lab coat, who was spattered with blood and shaking hard enough to rattle his own teeth.

“This one’s programming has been unstable from the start,” Pierce said. “It’s a liability we can’t afford.”

In the background, medical personnel swarmed the room to remove the dead and the injured. 

“Sir, with respect—”

“See, whenever someone starts a sentence with that, all I hear is ‘please listen to my excuses.’”

The scientist’s mouth snapped shut and he tucked his chin into his chest. He tried to control the way his hands shook, but he wasn’t up for the task.

“Tell me what set it off this time,” Pierce said. He slipped his hands into his pockets and tipped his face up, brows raised, the picture of attention. “Keep it short and sweet, Ramsey.”

“The target was a schoolteacher,” the scientist said. “The children were collateral damage. He… didn’t like that.”

“It’s not supposed to like or dislike things,” Pierce snapped. “It’s supposed to do as it’s told and keep its mouth shut. You’re doing something wrong.”

“Sir, we just need to find the right combination of—”

“Twenty-five years of botched ops and flimsy patches and your department’s poor excuses,” Pierce said. “It ends now.”

“Sir, with r-respect, he’s one of our strongest candi—”

“ _It_ is an experiment that has failed, and now it’s over.” Pierce kept his eyes on the quaking Ramsey, but held a hand out to one of his bodyguards. A handgun was placed in his palm. Without a break in his affable expression, he landed three slugs in the Winter Soldier’s brain. Ramsey swallowed convulsively. Pierce handed the gun back to its handler, wiped his hands unhurriedly with a handkerchief, and stepped over the Winter Soldier’s bleeding body to leave.

Bucky wanted to follow him. Bucky wanted to rip his beating heart out and shove it down his throat. Bucky wanted to fall at his feet and let him stroke through his hair while thanking Bucky for his service to the world. Bucky’s insides seized up and he vomited again, nothing but bile. Becca floated over to him. He thought he could feel her hand on his back, kind of a soft electric buzz, like moth wings.

“By the ’70s,” she said, “HYDRA has a stranglehold on world security, and Pierce is rising quickly through the ranks. It’s easier to sow terror when the economy’s down.”

“And when you’ve got your own personal army of slaves.”

“That too,” Becca said softly.

“Tell me he dies horribly here.” Bucky didn’t care that his voice shook, that he was begging. “Tell me it’s painful and humiliating and—” His body contracted with a dry heave, but there was nothing left to bring up.

“I never made much of a liar, Buck,” Becca said, gentle. He felt her again, the phantom suggestion of touch. “Come on.”

“Jesus Christ, there’s _more?_ ” Bucky said. “I can’t take it, Beck. Uncle. Uncle.”

“Just a little longer, I promise,” Becca said. “And then I’ll take you home. I’ll take you home, Bucky.”

Bucky scrubbed his face, and found that it was wet.

—

When the world coalesced around him again, Bucky found himself in a school. For some measure of the word.

Kids as young as three and as old as fifteen populated the classrooms. There was no idle chatter. There was no laughter. There were no high, childish voices — only the snap and order of adult ones. Target practice, foreign language study, various forms of hand to hand combat lessons, and, oddly, drama classes. In some rooms, children were being tortured, and if they cried out, their punishments grew. Bucky trailed after Becca through all the corridors and peeked in all the rooms. Surrounded by children, he found nothing of childhood in these walls. 

“What is this?” he asked eventually. “What are we doing here?”

“This is the next stage in the Winter Soldier program,” Becca said. 

Bucky swallowed down his nausea. He’d had enough of that to last him another lifetime and change. 

“They’re just kids.”

“After the Falsworth debacle, it was decided that the purest soldier was one who had never had human ties or pesky moral centers. Turns out, those can be pretty stubborn, and they can get in the way of following orders. Brainwashing, apparently, can only do so much.”

_The Winter Soldier is watching a man fall. That man has a face that makes his mind itch, makes his stomach clench. That man freed him from a fallen support strut and laid his shield down when the Winter Soldier raised his own arm for a killing blow. That man said, ‘You’re my friend,’ and an unnamed thing inside the Winter Soldier clawed at his lungs like a beast in a cage._

_The Winter Soldier is watching a man fall, and there is no command, no mission, nothing but a howling urgency that makes the soldier dive a thousand feet after him into the depths of the river. What compels him is a deeper directive he cannot disobey. He is a soldier, and he follows his orders. It is not his place to question them._

Bucky rubbed his eyes and walked right through Becca.

“Hey!” 

“Sorry,” he said. He stopped and raised his eyebrows in question. She nodded toward another classroom. Bucky steeled himself and passed through the door, Becca at his side.

Two adults sat behind a long table, hands lanced together on the wood top. Before them stood a gangly boy who had not yet filled out from his latest growth spurt and a short, slim girl with red hair and dead eyes.

“Natalia,” Bucky said. He turned to Becca. “Is this the Red Room? I — I trained her there, but it didn’t look like this.”

“It’s 1998,” Becca said, “and the Red Room never existed because HYDRA was already doing their work for them, out in the open.”

“But her life — it’s not so different, here.”

“When you trained her, what did you do?”

“Sharpshooting,” Bucky said. “Krav Maga. English.”

“And?”

Bucky ground his teeth together. “We were — tender. Together. I’m not proud of that.”

“Maybe you should be.”

“She was enslaved. That wasn’t a choice she could make.”

“So were you. And seems to me, maybe that’s the only choice either of you ever made. Maybe it was the only soft thing either of you could ever remember. Maybe that small thing is what gave her the strength to save herself when she had to.” 

“I didn’t remember.”

“She did.” Becca nodded at Natalia again and Bucky forced himself to look. 

She was stiff and straight-backed, hands locked behind her back. Beside her, the boy slouched and fidgeted. 

“You understand your failure,” the woman behind the table said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Natalia and the boy said in unison.

“Explain it to me.”

“These bodies are not our own, but the state’s,” Natalia said as if reciting.

“We do not have opinions or desires,” the boy said.

“We desecrate state property when we perform unsanctioned actions with these bodies.”

“We owe reparations to the state for those unsanctioned actions.”

“Correct,” the man behind the table said. “And what does the state demand?”

“Blood,” Natalia said, voice clear and unwavering. A fraction of a second after her, the boy mumbled the same thing.

“Number 84-501,” said the woman behind the table, “and Number 84-589, either of you would have made excellent agents for the state. It is a shame you let your weaknesses overwhelm your commitment to the glory of HYDRA. Begin.”

The boy put up only a perfunctory fight. He grappled with Natalia. He got in one good right hook that broke her nose and made blood spatter across the floor, but she didn’t seem to feel it at all. In the end, she launched herself up and locked his head between her thighs. He scrabbled at her hips, her legs, scored bloody grooves into her skin with his fingernails, but his face turned purple, and blood vessels in the whites of his eyes burst, and he staggered until he fell to his knees. Natalia, face stony and flat, freed him from the lock of her legs and landed on nimble, silent feet only to reach out her two small hands and snap his neck with effortless grace. The boy slumped lifeless to the floor and Natalia stood tall and straight in front of the table, breath even and steady.

“Congratulations, Number 84-501,” the man behind the table said. “Change your clothes and report to your Mandarin lessons. We will provide you with a note for Comrade Xia.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “Thank you, sir.”

The scene faded away, and Bucky plodded along behind Becca again.

“She becomes the crown jewel of the Winter Soldier program,” Becca said after an interminable silence. “The perfect operative. She never hesitates. She never compromises. She never fails a single mission.”

“She’s a monster.”

“She’s what they made her. Can you blame her?”

Bucky shook his head. How could he blame the bit of tinder someone else had sharpened into a knife?

—

Becca led him through the crush of a crowd in a big city. The buildings were bland and nondescript, so unspecific Bucky couldn’t even tell what country he was in, much less identify the city itself. People bustled around as usual. Some of them smiled. Most of them looked harried at the press of strangers against them. Once in a while, a couple passed, sometimes arguing, sometimes holding hands.

“What do you see?” Becca said.

“People. City. Nothing interesting.”

“Okay, what don’t you see?”

Bucky frowned at the back of her head and fought to catch up to her. Walking was less efficient than floating.

“Architectural identifiers,” he said. “Unique street names.”

“ _Who_ don’t you see?”

Bucky scanned the crowd. Was he supposed to be looking for someone? A Winter Soldier? There were none in the crowd. Not Natalia, or Dum Dum, or Gabe. 

Or anyone who looked like Gabe.

“Um.” He cleared his throat. “All these are white folks.”

“Sure.”

“So, we’re in Europe? But where are the buildings? European cities are hundreds of years old. This is…”

“Have you ever known a big city, even in Europe, to lack any color at all? Tourists, travelers, immigrants, second- third- fourth-generation children?”

Bucky felt his neck go hot.

“HYDRA…eliminates threats to itself,” he said. “And HYDRA began as a faction of the Nazi party.”

“So who are we not seeing here, big brother?”

“Oh God, Beck. Oh my God.”

“Say it.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Make it real, Buck.”

“Jews,” Bucky said, and gasped for breath. “Gypsies. Queers. Blacks. Asians. Anyone who’s not white, and anyone who’s not the right shade of white. Dissenters. Political enemies. People who worship the wrong way. People who think the wrong thing.”

“HYDRA paradise,” Becca said. She rose heads above the crowd and spun slowly around as if assessing. “Perfect order, if this is how you define something like that.”

Suddenly a woman on the sidewalk shrieked and dropped to the ground, dead. A bullet had rendered the back of her head mush, and blood pooled around her thick and steady. There were gasps and then a hush as people in riot gear emerged as if from the shadows and dragged her body away. Then, every billboard and large-screen television previously showing some ad flickered to life and Alexander Pierce’s face, wizened now but with eyes just as sharp, filled the screens, filled the blank spaces around the buildings, filled Bucky’s field of vision. His voice rang out and Bucky’s innards quaked.

“Hail HYDRA,” Pierce said. He paused a moment, and all around Bucky voices from the crowd rose up to respond in kind. Pierce smiled. “Your safety is important to us. Your security is all that matters. Order is paramount. Your government thanks you for being upstanding citizens of the world. I am so proud of all of you. Hail HYDRA.”

“Hail HYDRA,” the people around Bucky said, some quiet, some loud, none in unison. It was a dizzying sound that made Bucky stumble even though there was nothing to stumble on, and the screens flickered again before winking back to their previous displays.

“It’s a recording,” Becca said when he got to an open spot on the curb and hung his head down between his knees. “It comes up every time someone’s eliminated in public. Keeps morale up.”

“I got that,” Bucky said. 

“There will always be people who threaten HYDRA,” Becca said. “But there will also always be the thousands of Winter Soldiers, and all the algorithms of Project Insight. There’s no coming back from that for these people. This is a world without hope.”

“Rebellion,” Bucky said, but even as it left his mouth he knew it was a weak word with no meaning here. “Revolution.”

Becca shrugged. It looked less like the lack of concern Bucky had mistaken it for in the beginning of their journey, and more like the futile gesture of someone who had lost too much to dream of something better.

“Those aren’t even in their vocabulary,” she said. “And if they are…” She tucked three fingers into her palm to make a gun, and she set its barrel at her temple. “Bang bang.”

“How do we fix this? How do we make it stop?”

Becca smiled at him, sad and soft, like an old woman who heard her grandchild say something terribly naive but sweet all the same. Bucky supposed that wasn’t far off. She had gotten to grow old. She knew more about the world than he did, both this one and the one they’d come from. She had earned that by living through the years he’d spent on ice, or tracking down good people to be killed, or training other people to do the same. He had survived so much blood and death, but surviving wasn’t living. Surviving wasn’t understanding. 

“I’m glad you want to, Buck,” she said. “But I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do for them. This is just how it goes, without you.”

Bucky felt himself go faint as all the blood in his body pooled somewhere in the vicinity of his feet. 

“One person cannot be that important,” he said. “I cannot be that important. The people I killed…”

“The people you were ordered to kill after being trafficked and brainwashed represent a single drop in the ocean compared to the slaughter of billions that would have occurred had you not existed, had you not been the Winter Soldier, had you not loved Steve, and Natasha, and yourself.”

“I can’t,” Bucky whispered.

“You are so unkind to yourself, Bucky,” Becca said. “I wonder if you would blame Dum Dum, or Gabe, or Falsworth, or Natasha the way you blame yourself.”

“It’s different.”

“How?”

“I don’t — it just is, okay?”

“Because you should have been strong enough. Because you should have been able to stop it.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“But for them — it wasn’t their fault.”

“It’s not the same.”

“And Steve?”

“What?”

“There’s another world, where he falls off that train instead of you and HYDRA gets him. Should he have known better? Should he have found a way to resist torture and mind wiping and Stockholm Syndrome? Is the way they used his body his fault?”

Bucky’s vision blurred with tears and he shook his head. He thought horror was watching his friends die or be enslaved. All of that was nothing to the searing lance through his heart at the thought of Steve in Zola’s hands, at Pierce’s feet, at the other end of a gun that would steal a measure of his humanity every time he pulled the trigger. Bucky’s throat worked around words that couldn’t form. Becca knelt beside him. 

“No one’s asking you to let it go like it didn’t happen,” she said. “But you’re allowed to lay down your burdens. You’re allowed to be a person in the world. You’re allowed to be happy, Buck.”

“I’m so tired,” Bucky said. “I’m just so tired.”

“I know,” Becca said. “But you saved the world. That’s thirsty work.”

Bucky snorted and scrubbed at his face.

“I did not,” he grumbled.

“Looks that way to me,” Becca said. “I know it’s… cold comfort. But because you suffered, billions of people in our world didn’t have to. Like I said, we at the home office owe you a debt.”

She waved her hand, and through the resulting portal Bucky saw Steve, packing a bag and rushing around his apartment putting things in order while Sam Wilson stood in the middle of the flurry with his big hands raised and splayed.

“I’m just saying, the guy asked you to leave him alone, and maybe you have to respect his boundaries on this one,” Wilson said.

“You didn’t see the look in his eye, Sam,” Steve said. “You should know better than anyone that we can’t leave someone who looks like that alone.”

“All I’m saying is you can’t be everything to him, and you shouldn’t beat yourself up about that. He needs the kind of help you’re too close to provide, and he’s refusing to seek it. You’re not a counselor, and you’re not his savior. You don’t have to play the hero all the time, Steve. That wears on you.”

Steve stopped in front of Wilson, duffle half full and dangling from one hand. He looked Wilson dead in the eyes.

“He’s _my_ hero, Sam,” he said. “Always has been, always will be. There is nothing in this world that will make me give up on him. I’m gonna go find him, and even if yells at me, even if he scratches my eyes out, I’m gonna be the one in his corner. I’m gonna be the one fighting for him. I understand if you don’t want to be a part of that, but it’s what I’ve got to do.”

Wilson held Steve’s gaze for a long time.

“You know me, Cap,” he said. “I’ll be here, waiting for my orders.” 

Bucky closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, he was on the Brooklyn Bridge with the toes of his boots hanging off, and Becca was peering at him with those old eyes that saw too much. The sky had lightened to a deep lavender, though the sun had not yet made its appearance. Its rays over the horizon betrayed it. Bucky’s grip on the rail tightened.

“I don’t know how to do this,” Bucky said. “Living.”

“You put one foot in front of the other,” Becca said.

“I’m glad. I’m glad I was around.”

Becca smiled, and when a breeze came, she swayed and faded, just a little.

“Becca. You all right up there?”

“I’ll be fine, Buck. I’ll be watching you.”

“I — thank you.”

“You should look up my other kids and listen to the Boss with them. You should go hiking and watch TV with their kids. And you should dandle _their_ kids on your knee, like a good great-great-uncle.”

“I wish… I wish I hadn’t missed you, the first time around.”

“It’s okay, big brother,” Becca said. She winked. “Say hi to Steve for me.”

The light of the sun bled out over the water, and Becca was gone. The water glittered, a hundred thousand points of light, and Bucky couldn’t help it: he laughed, and it felt rusty, and painful, and there were tears, but it was so, so good.

—

The sun rose, and Bucky walked slowly back toward Brooklyn on the pedestrian walkway. More cars turned up on the bridge, and some early morning runners. The world looked bright and kind, and the air smelled of fresh, crisp autumn, and in the distance, Brooklyn looked like nothing so much as an old friend whose arms were spread wide, awaiting him. He stood up straighter, and taller.

When he got off the bridge at Adams Street, the rumble of a motorcycle made him look up. It was Steve, of course, wearing no helmet because helmet laws could not contain him, and he was traveling in the opposite direction. Bucky’s heart flipped over when he saw him, and when Steve caught sight of Bucky, his whole face illuminated. He glanced around himself before executing an ostentatious U-turn and pulling up to a stop right beside Bucky. 

“Fancy meeting you here,” Steve said, breath a little too quick. “Need a ride somewhere?”

“You know,” Bucky said, “I think I might like to take your friend up on some of that VA talk talk he’s always selling.”

Steve favored him with a big grin that threatened to go watery, but he cleared his throat and said, “I think that’s a great idea, Buck.”

“And maybe replace this thing with something more normal.” He waved his left arm.

“We can do that, too,” Steve said.

“Breakfast first?”

“I know a great place for waffles. Twenty-four hours, real maple syrup, surly as hell staff.”

“Just how I like it,” Bucky said. 

“Hop on, punk.” 

Bucky’s mouth curved upward, and Steve looked at him with big soft eyes. He came up to the bike, but before he could swing a leg over it, he leaned in and pressed his lips to Steve’s cheekbone. When he pulled back, Steve had gone pink and blinked at him.

“Thanks for… being you,” Bucky said.

“I — you’re welcome.”

“Can I kiss you?”

Bucky watched the bob of Steve’s Adam’s apple, and then Steve nodded with a single jerk of his head. 

Bucky nudged Steve’s mouth, and Steve closed a hand over the back of his neck and let him in with a soft whimper. Sparks like electricity dazzled up Bucky’s spine as he felt the soft swipe of Steve’s tongue against his, so long missed. 

It felt like the breeze through falling leaves. It felt like being alive. 

 

**End**


End file.
